Notes
2025/08/11

RC week 12: tail call statement (recurse center in numbers)

It is common to write what's known as a "return statement" after a batch at the Recurse Center, to talk about the experience of spending 6 or 12 weeks there. I've decided to extend my stay for another 12 weeks, so this is more of a tail recursive call than a full function return.

Here are my 12 weeks in numbers:

• Published 12 weekly blog posts.
• Wrote 60 daily checkins, 5 checkins per week.
• Wrote 2 papers, on live reload with replay semantics and reasonable macros through explicit bindings.
• Gave 1 presentation+ on Kombucha and why I'm building a minimal and malleable programming language.
• Gave 6 technical presentations, about testing infrastructure, reasonable macros, replay semantics, serde and interop part 1, serde and interop part 2 (with Rhea), buffy bot (with Victoria).
• Gave 4 non-programming talks: "How to bullshit your way through film theory", "Fuck the Emoji Police", "How to justify working on something useless" and (together with Viola) "ghost in the machine".
• Gave 2 presentations in the linguistics group, on Wittgenstein's concept of language games and algorithmic information theory.
• Co-organized and hosted 5 movie nights at the Brooklyn hub.
• Organized 1 Hypertext Club event.
• Collaboratively decoded 4(-ish) languages while playing Chants of Sennaar.
• Watched 55 episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and exchanged 1300+ messages analyzing the show together with Victoria.
• Pushed 100 commits to the Kombucha repository and implemented 2 example programs in Kombucha (including the static site generator used by this website).

These numbers are the least interesting part of the story, however. Much more important were all the pairing sessions, the frequent discussions at the kitchen table and the atmosphere of curiosity and sheer joy of building things that characterize the Recurse Center. These things are impossible to quantify, but they make RC what it is.

(If that sounds like something you're interested in, join the Recurse Center.)